Modern Transubstantiation

'The media has another essential function. It is the creator of images for consumption. It creates celebrities and personalities for people to look up to and vicariously live through. It creates role images for people to imitate in order to invent their “identity”. It creates images of events separated from and placed above life. It is through these images, ingested uncritically, that people are to view and interpret the world, formulating their opinions out of this virtual unreality…

In choosing to seek to get one’s ideas across through the media, one is choosing to feed these ideas to this masticating monster, to offer one’s self to this life-draining ghoul. For anarchists this makes no sense. It is impossible for the media to portray anarchism as a living praxis or anarchists as complex multi-dimensional individuals. It is therefore not possible to express anarchist ideas in a worthwhile way through this forum. The ideas will be chewed up and shat out as one opinion among many, one more turd about whose odor the public can argue. The living individuals get chewed up and shat out as images-of freaks, of intellectual brooders, of street rioters-but essentially as images not living, acting beings. The media is part of the power structure, and, as such, is our enemy. We can’t play their game and win.'

via Minneapolis IndyMedia